Sustainable Public Procurement: Realization of the Social Aspect in Republic of Lithuania/Darnieji Viesieji Pirkimai: Socialinio Aspekto Realiza Cija Lietuvos Respublikoje

Introduction In 20th century, the dwindling natural resources, the growing scale of consumption of developed countries and increasingly overwhelming problems of poverty and hunger in developing countries forced the world to look back and assess the damage caused to the environment and social balance of the world community. In virtue of the United Nations initiatives, on a global scale the world's countries were invited to change the usual behaviour stereotypes and begin to follow the new ideology of social development, i.e. sustainable development, which is based on the elements that are obligatory for implementation at all facets of society: environmental protection, responsible social and economic development. The world step by step translated the objectives of sustainable development into national programming documents and legislation, and began to look for the appropriate legal and other social measures to implement these ideas (Tvaronaviciene 2012). Public procurement, by means of which states purchase goods, works and services needed to carry out the functions thereof, is recognized as one of the most important instruments of state policy (Brammer, Walker 2007; Thai 2001; McCrudden 2004; Medina-Arnaiz in 2010 and others), so while implementing the sustainable development concept in the world, it is also considered to be a suitable legal tool for the dissemination of sustainable development principles, which led to the development and wide application of the concept of sustainable public procurement. It is noted that the sustainable public procurement is usually seen exclusively through the prism of the environment protection, sometimes as a stimulant of responsible and progressive economic growth, but sparsely in a social aspect. This element of sustainable development in the context of public procurement gets relatively little emphasis in academic researches. This confirms the need for a deeper analysis of this issue. Relevance of the topic is also revealed by the fact that the EU public procurement law (and thus the national law of the Member States) is in a constant process of change, and the effective evolution needs guidelines for direction for the development. Having developed the concept of socially-oriented purchases and disclosed applicability thereof, they are potentially capable to help countries to achieve better results in the creation of the welfare state. It should also be noted that many countries are looking for ways to engage the public sector to use more social criteria in public procurement. Systematised analysis of such possibilities have the potential to be widely applicable in practice. Notably, despite the relevance and high practical applicability, the issue of public procurement as an implementation tool for social aspect of sustainable development has not been extensively analysed in scientific literature. The works of McCruden (2004, 2007 etc) should be noted as the most important in this field. In Lithuanian science, the social aspect of sustainable public procurement has been researched extremely little. Individual issues of social requirements in public procurement have been dealt with in a fragmentary way only (Soloveicikas 2009; Junevicius, Ereminaite 2010; Palidauskaite, Ereminaite 2010; Tvaronaviciene 2012). Given the relevance and novelty of the study, it is stipulated that in addition to the educational value, the theoretical and practical significance of this study will take the form of application of the analysis for improvement of the legal regulatory framework and grounding further research of social public procurement. The objective of the study is to reveal the concept of social dimension of sustainable public procurement and its practical application features. The object of the study is a social dimension of sustainable public procurement. The following are the tasks of the research: 1. To define the concept of social aspect according to the conception of sustainable public procurement. …